They enter our world. They could be anyone. Murderers. Child molesters. Drug addicts. People with psychopathic tendencies. Full blown psychopaths. The works.
Why is it, then, that parents always try to tell us that we entered their world instead...that they were kind enough to put us up, and consequently, we owe them everything we have acquired and achieved? They can fuck up royally when they raise us, but we are obligated to at least feel indebted to their efforts. The band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young reminds us that even when what they do is extremely hurtful, parents have our best interest at heart. (Well thank god they meant well. The insurance companies inquire about that when we're sitting on a couch with a tissue box for 50 minutes a week, every week, for the rest of our lives.)
In a similar fashion, many people want us to focus on what lies underneath this facade of uncaring and fucking up royally. But my focus is on why the facade is there to begin with.
When my friends say-with good intentions-that I should reconcile things with my parents, one of the first conclusions they jump to is that my parents love me; they just don’t always show it.
Well, no shit. Most parents genuinely love their children.
But if someone hurts you consistently, is that love useful anymore? Does it remain relevant? Is it something you can build a life around?
The answer to all of that is, “No.” This love fails us, much as a recommended course of treatment that sustains our lives but causes much pain and suffering along the way.
If I had a nickel for every time someone told me to mend familial bonds, I still wouldn’t be able to do anything that I had not been able to do when nickel-less, because let’s face it. Nickels are a useless currency nowadays.
Imagine the lack of utility that is inherent in a stack of nickels. Hell, you wouldn’t even be able to buy Advil from a vending machine or do your laundry in the Rutgers dorms.
You might end up going to the gas station twenty-five times in order to afford the former in nickels, and fifty to afford the latter. And when you finally get there, the automated coin machine only takes quarters.
Those nickels are my parents. Their love is useless to me relative to how much money I am going to have to spend in order to fix the amount of damage that they have inflicted.
They enter our world, and then they take over our lives. They are the antecedent that we did not ask for, but are obligated to enforce and uphold. They intrude upon our existence.
If a partner or significant were to invade our personal space, issue threats, and deal blows, our friends would order us to leave them instantly. There is no such thing as that kind of abuser having redeeming qualities.
But an abuser of the parental variety is always given a second chance. Why is that? Why do those same friends and even some therapists push survivors to patch things up with the people who destroyed our lives? Is it because these very people have bequeathed us with that life in the first place?
My question is this: if you administer the CPR that saves someone from drowning after you push them into a freezing lake, should you be still be convicted of trying to kill them? Hopefully, the answer will always be yes.
This is no different. Just because someone has conceived you does not mean that they are entitled to destroy you.
When you are robbed of something during childhood, your entire life will be spent grieving the loss of what could have been. The mourning process will never cease.
Those who have robbed you will always owe you something.
The question is whether or not what they took from you is worth pursuing once it has already been taken.
Your relationship with them will be tantamount to the power struggle implicit in a perennial lawsuit. By pursuing damages, the victim becomes even more damaged in the process.
Undoubtedly, you decide to stick around into adulthood because on some level, you still feel as though you require their approval in order to carry on. Before long, you become possessed by the need to be approved.
But love, like any other emotion, is primordial. We can never allow it to get the best of us. Our willingness to be devoted to another life unconditionally should arise out of relevance and because it is applicable, not because a cesspool of phylogenetically ancient emotions has started to leak into our higher seat of thought.
The moment they extend ownership instead of guidance, families make slaves out of free human beings and turn ancestry into a chain.
Those who have a greater proclivity for guilt are less likely to walk away from situations that cause them to be broken. I have no way of knowing if I will be one of those people. What I do know for now is that the love I feel for my friends is a deliberate love, one born to conscious volition and effort, not the transient passions that dictate the puppy love between school children or the obligatory devotion that the birth canal drills into a child.
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